Grade: C+

Verdict: A cliché-ridden popcorn movie with great special effects.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

The sun'll come out in "The Day After Tomorrow," but first you have to slog through almost two hours of bad plot and wooden characters, intermittently punctuated by some spectacular depictions of bad-weather catastrophes.

Veteran blockbuster pro that he is, Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "Godzilla") doles out his money-shot mayhem in shrewdly spaced doses. We await our next CGI-fix as eagerly as junkies queue up for their methadone cocktail.

"The Day After Tomorrow" is summer-movie hoo-hah on a grand scale. Meaning, to fairly assess it any critic must really review two movies. One is the special-effects thrill ride you've been promised in the trailers. The other is the necessary connective tissue that no one ever wants to see.

Dennis Quaid does most of the heavy lifting as Professor Jack Hall, a climatologist who's vainly trying to convince an administration dismissive of the environment (mostly embodied by a Dick Cheney-ish VP, played by Kenneth Welsh) that global warming could have a catastrophic effect. Sometime in the next thousand years, the next hundred years, even, uh, the day after tomorrow, a polar meltdown could trigger the kind of mess that Weather Channel junkies can only imagine.

Sure enough, within a blink of an eye, hail the size of mean critics' egos bombards Tokyo, snow blankets New Delhi, tornadoes destroy L.A. and a blizzard buries Europe.

In Manhattan, the zoo animals are pairing up two by two, presaging a heart-stopping tidal wave, followed by a sub-zero ice storm. As a ghostly Russian oil tanker drops anchor at the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, Jack's semi-estranged son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), and a hand-picked cross-section of survivors hole up in the top floor of the New York City public library, where they burn books to keep themselves alive.

As Jack fearlessly sets out from D.C. to Manhattan to rescue his son, a number of embarrassing "Fantasy Island"-style subplotlets compete for our attention. Jack's wife (Sela Ward) bravely sticks by a child ill with cancer as D.C. evacuates, while Ian Holm and some buddies hunker down in a remote weather station in Scotland, awaiting the inevitable.

Fortunately (in a manner of speaking), the film's cheese quotient is so high that, for the most part, traumatic memories of the all-too-real horrors of Sept. 11 are sublimated. Still, when a TV anchor announces that Lower Manhattan is inaccessible, a chill -- and a slight sense of outrage at Hollywood insensitivity -- shivers down your spine.

But at heart, "The Day After Tomorrow" is an unabashed throwback to the disaster movies of the '70s, when ocean liners turned upside-down and high-rise infernos towered. As Quaid and Gyllenhaal struggle to invest their no-dimensional characters with complexity, you can sense the spirits of Shelley Winters, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen cheering them on. After all, they've survived dumb-fun disaster flicks like this themselves.